Dry Heat
by Kleenexwoman
Summary: After Bill's death, Nora must navigate her own fears and desires.
1. shadows in my room

Nora hadn't liked coming home, after Bill died. The apartment seemed empty, too cold and sparse. Work was easy, and she threw herself into it with a vengeance, tackling small and monotonous tasks that she normally would have farmed out to grad students. She could ignore it all there, pretend that Bill was only off on another story and she was working late, that they'd see each other in a day or two like they usually did. When she came home every day and the lights were off and the ice cream in the back of the freezer was uneaten and his laptop was closed and cold, she could no longer ignore his persistent absence. Some part of her had finally accepted it back in that New Mexico canyon, where she'd let him go under a waterfall, and then that part of her had gone numb.

She knew that she was coping during the day. If she was irritable sometimes, it was only from lack of sleep; if she sometimes sat at her desk and stared at nothing, let an hour slip by without realizing it, it was because she had so much work to do and needed to recharge.

The only time she felt anything besides boredom or irritation seemed to be at night, when the shadows crept in. She'd lie in bed, watching the light from the moon or the streetlamps filter in through the slats of the blinds, eyes flicking back and forth. She saw little movements out of the corner of her eyes, and could not tell if they were insects, ghosts, dead bodies come back to life, or the mirages of sleeplessness. When she did sleep, her dreams were filled with rotting faces and scenes of endless peril--flash floods, avalanches, the people she loved drowning or falling from great heights. She phoned her brother twice at five in the morning just to make sure he had not been trampled by a moose.

One night, she woke up with her heart pounding, her mouth dry. She did not know what time it was, but it was dark and too quiet, and the walls seemed to be closing in on her. She got out of bed and slipped on her sneakers, grabbed her wallet and her keys, and went outside. The air outside was chillier than she had expected; it was fall, and winter was coming. Her thin cotton pajamas were less protection against the chill than they had been in the stifling heat of her apartment, but she did not want to go back inside for anything.

~o~o~

Nora showed up at D'Agosta's apartment at three in the morning, in her pajamas. She didn't say anything when he opened the door in his boxers and ratty gray tank top, just stared at him with wild, red-rimmed eyes.

"Are you okay?" he asked, and immediately regretted it. Of course she wasn't okay. "Come in," he said, and she slipped inside, darting a nervous glance over her shoulder.

He sat her on the couch and got a bathrobe out of the hall closet, wrapped it around her shoulders. She was shivering, and he sat down beside her. "What happened? Somebody follow you here?"

She shook her head. "No," she said, "nobody followed me. I just--I couldn't stay there, not tonight. I had this nightmare..." The noise she made was somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "It's so stupid. I'm sorry for bothering you. I don't know what's wrong with me."

"It's okay," he said, and put a hand on her shoulder. "You can stay here as long as you need."

She sat hunched in the bathrobe, looking small and fragile, and he put an arm around her. She leaned into him, resting her head on his chest. It felt so good to hold her; she was warm and soft next to him, and her breathing seemed to be slowing, the flutter of her heartbeat less frantic. After a while, her eyes closed.

He let her sleep on him until he felt himself start to grow sleepy again, and then he slipped out from under her and went to bed, a vague sense of guilt gnawing at the pit of his stomach. After the business with the "cult" in Inwood Park, he and Pendergast had been trying to take care of Nora, drop in when they could, make sure she was okay. But things had happened, and she'd gone off to New Mexico and come back looking so much better, acting like everything had been settled, like she'd moved on.

He got up and grabbed his blanket, laid it over her sleeping form, and went back to bed.

~o~o~

Nora drifted in and out of sleep, and for the first time in weeks she dreamed of nothing except for warmth and darkness. When she awoke at last, the room was dark, and she was surprised to realize that she knew exactly where she was. She pulled the blanket up to her nose; it still smelled like D'Agosta, a comfortable mixture of sweat, soap, and something else she couldn't quite name.

She thought of rising from the couch, going into D'Agosta's room, watching him sleep. Crawling into his bed. Putting her arms around him. He was larger than Bill, solid and heavy and powerful (in more ways than one, as she'd noticed as he'd stood in the door in his underwear, still blinking from being woken up)--she usually wasn't attracted to those types of men. Once she'd started to love Bill, she'd been attracted to his energy, the odd grace of his awkward, sometimes hyperkinetic movements, the slimness of his frame that never filled out no matter how much he ate.

She wasn't sure that she desired D'Agosta so much as she wanted to curl up next to him, to have him wrap around her like a blanket. She thought about having him anyway, feeling a little ashamed, but not enough to care. He would be sleepy if she woke him up, she decided, and would take a while to arouse. He wouldn't be delicate with her, but he would be gentle, easing himself into her slowly. She liked the idea of it, and as she dropped off to sleep she imagined herself lying next to him, running her fingers through the dark, coarse hair on his body, listening to the rumbling sound of his breathing.

When she awoke again, the apartment was light and D'Agosta was gone. It was nearly noon. She went into his kitchen and made herself a cup of coffee, more out of habit and for something to do than because she needed it, and she lay back down on the couch, holding the blanket against her face.

She left before he came back, knowing that if she was there when he came back, she would not want to leave that day. It was in some ways easier to go back to her apartment, even knowing the terrors that lurked in the shadows for her.

As she walked back still chilly in her pajamas, she imagined that Bill would be waiting at home for her.


	2. yeah, I want to pull you down into bed

Nora had met Margo at the station. She'd been smiling, eager to get back to work at the Museum and see all of her friends again. She'd wrapped her thin arms around Nora and hugged her, and Nora had hugged her back, feeling as though she might break if she squeezed too much.

"How are you?" Margo had asked. "How's Bill?"

She'd been quiet in the car, listening as Nora had recited the whole saga. She'd gotten so used to telling the story that it almost seemed like fiction to her, like the plot of a horror novel she'd read years ago. "You didn't know?" she finally asked. "It was in the Times and everything. And I called you..." She realized she didn't know where Margo had been at all, if her sabbatical had taken her somewhere the death of a New York city reporter wouldn't have made a difference.

Margo shook her head. "I was at my mother's," she said distantly. "In Long Island. She barely let me out of bed, let alone the house. She wouldn't even let me watch the news--she said it was too stressful. Doctor's orders. I had to rest."

When they finally reached her apartment, it was filled with yellow and brown leaves. They littered the top of her piano, drifted among the shelves of artifacts she had collected. They crunched under Nora's feet as she dragged Margo's suitcase across the hardwood floor and rested it on the sofa.

She looked back at Margo. Her friend's lithe body had deteriorated during her convalescence, and now she was thin, still weak; her body shook as she slumped dejectedly against the frame of the door. "Do you need help?" The offer was deliberately vague.

Margo shook her head, making a lock of her short brown hair (shorter than Nora had ever seen it; she had almost mistaken Margo for a boy at the train station where she'd met her) fall over her eyes. "I'm fine," she said. "The leaves shouldn't be too hard to clean up." She touched the withered leaves of a Japanese peace lily. "It's just...all my plants. I've been away for so long. They're all dead." She looked around, stared at the brown branches that festooned the apartment, bewildered. Nora went to Margo, putting an arm around her waist to support her as she stood looking at the peace lily.

"They're all dead," Margo said again. "I wasn't here to take care of them. I--" She sucked in a deep breath that sounded like a sob, and broke away from Nora, stumbling down the hall to her bedroom.

From the bedroom came a series of thumps, and then a crash. Fearing that Margo had hurt herself, Nora rushed in to see shards of a terracotta pot on the floor, surrounding a pile of dirt that held a cheery spray of green and indigo leaves.

"The goddamn African violet," Margo explained, her chest heaving, her face streaked with tears. "It was the only living thing in here." They both stared at it until Margo spoke again. "Leave it. I'll clean it later."

~o~o~

They went to Nora's. It was almost impossible for Margo to imagine Bill gone for so many weeks while she'd been lying in her childhood bed, nothing to look at except the grubby stuffed animals on the shelves and the tattered Bikini Kill posters on the walls, blissfully bored and zonked out of her mind on the painkillers she'd slowly been weaning herself from. She couldn't shake the feeling that he'd be there on the couch, bent over his laptop, waiting for Nora to drag her back to the apartment for a long, lazy night of good wine and rambling conversation.

Nora sat her on the couch and went into the kitchen, came back with a bottle of Laphroaig and three highball glasses. "I keep finding things of his around the house," she said. "I don't want it just sitting there, but I can't throw it out." She poured a shot into each glass, handed Margo one and set the other at the far end of the coffee table. "Cheers," she said, "I guess."

Margo sipped at the liquor, wincing as it burned its way over her tongue. After the burning came the taste of something dark and deep and strong, like the smell of a jungle floor where plants grow and die and rot without ever seeing the sun. "It's like kissing a bog person." She set her glass down.

Nora shrugged and sipped at her own glass. "You get used to it," she said.

One drink turned into three, and they ordered gourmet pizza and had more to drink. Margo began to tell Nora her own stories about Bill, the ones she'd never told anyone--how he'd show up in her office asking for a quote, drag her into a story, and within hours they'd be stuck running from people who wanted very much to smash his camera. How he'd ask her out to lunch and show her some little undiscovered place in the city he just thought she'd like--a single rose growing in a vacant lot, an abandoned factory with an entire ecosystem in its brick shell. How he'd tried to kiss her, once, and she'd pushed him away and told him to go home, and when he apologized he'd been the only man she'd ever known who was sincere about it.

"Oh," Nora said, and she poured whiskey into her own glass for the fourth time.

"It was before he'd even met you," Margo said.

Nora drained the glass in a single gulp and stood up. "It's late," she said. "Did you need to get home?"

Margo shook her head. The apartment had grown warm, and the whiskey in the glass at the end of the table had been evaporating slowly over the night, filling the air with the rich smell of the liquor. She felt dizzy. "Is it all right if I crash on your couch tonight?"

Nora sighed and helped Margo off the couch. They leaned on each other as they made their way to the bedroom, and then Nora pulled Margo down into the bed.

They lay next to each other, and Margo could hear Nora's breathing, see her eyes shining in the dark. She closed her eyes, trying to erase the reflexive panic that had begun to well up inside her, to block out the memory of fifteen years ago (had she really known Bill for that long? It too seemed impossible). When Nora touched her shoulder, it was as though an electric shock ran through her. Her heart seemed to stop, and she realized she could not breathe; her chest had closed up. She was drowning.

"Margo?" Nora whispered. She put an arm around Margo, slid closer to her. "Are you all right?"

Margo shook her head, and could not speak.

~o~o~

The whiskey had made Nora feel calmer than she had for a long time. With Margo there, talking and laughing with her, sharing memories and stories, Nora had felt for the first time since leaving New Mexico that things would be all right, that she could move on. Perhaps with Margo's help, even, and when she'd laid down next to her in the bed she and Bill had shared, she'd felt the warm glow of possibility between them.

Then Margo's breathing had become ragged, and in the faint light of the streetlamps she had seen Margo trembling. She'd been surprised and pleased and amused at first, thinking that Margo had become aroused with the whiskey and the close proximity. But Margo's eyes had widened in terror, and Nora had realized what she was going through.

She'd had nightmares, of course, and the nightmares had escalated with every strange incident, every monster or serial killer that she'd somehow been thrown into the middle of. Bill had always been there to comfort her when she awoke from them, and if he had ever had nightmares, he hadn't told Nora about them. Neither of them had ever had the panic attacks that Margo had, and Nora quietly thanked whatever quirk of neurology it was that had allowed her to escape the horrifying episodes. Fortunately, they were few and far between, but Nora had seen her share over the years she'd been friends with Margo.

The first time had been when the movie had come out. Some studio had optioned Bill's book about the Museum Monster, sent him a big fat check and an advance copy of the DVD when production was finished. They'd made a night of it, sat down to watch it together. She remembered Bill slowly realizing that he'd been cut out of the movie entirely; waiting excitedly for himself to come onscreen, growing disappointed and angry as it became clear that he'd been excised from his own story, then laughing wildly as the credits rolled.

But she also remembered Margo shifting nervously on the edge of the sofa, downing more and more wine as the movie went on. At first, she'd thought it was embarrassment from the tackiness of the movie or the odd sensation of seeing a Hollywood version of herself onscreen. Then, while Bill was still laughing, Margo had run to the bathroom. Nora had found her cowering against the sink, eyes wide, arms wrapped around her knees.

"I just feel so stupid," she'd said later. "It wasn't like the special effects were that good. It didn't even look like the Mbwun."

Now, she put her arm around Margo, pulled the other woman closer to her. "It's okay, I promise." But Margo's shaking did not stop for a long time, even though she twined her arms around Nora and pressed her face into the crook of her neck.


	3. summer rain calling for her mind again

Snow began to fall on New York, and Nora woke up one day unable to speak, breathe, or swallow. She spent the morning in a hot shower, gagging and coughing, letting the steam slowly boil out the sickness in her body.

The next week saw her miserable and stranded on the couch, the constant low-level agony and wooziness brought on by cough syrup temporarily chasing out the constance of grief. If Bill's absence made things less bearable, at least for once she was not aware of the cause.

Margo came to see her, and commandeered the kitchen to make soup. Nora watched her from the couch, sniffling into a Kleenex, vaguely aware of how tentative Margo's movements were, how slow. She poked at the lopsided bready spheres floating in the broth when Margo finally set down a bowl before her. "Dumplings?"

"Matzah balls. My mom used to make these for me when I was sick. They're not as good as hers, but..." Margo shrugged.

Nora tasted the objects. They were pleasantly bland and had the consistency of Jell-O. She set the bowl aside, curling up until she felt Margo's body slide next to hers, felt her friend's arms around her. "You don't know of any obscure Peruvian plants that can cure the common cold, do you?"

"Not that won't turn you into a werewolf or something." Margo stroked Nora's forehead. Nora closed her eyes, feeling tired and a little dizzy even lying in Margo's arms. She felt something soft and moist on her forehead...Margo's hand, her lips, a wet cloth? She was so warm, so sleepy, it was hard to tell.

"Don't worry, though." Margo's voice was in her ears, weaving itself into the strands of sensation that surrounded her. "I'll take care of you."

When Nora woke up a few hours later, dehydrated and sweaty, Margo had fallen asleep. Nora rested her head on Margo's stomach, listening to the evenness of her breath and the small noises her stomach made. She pressed her mouth to Margo's stomach, idly tasting her skin.

~o~o~

The infection passed, but somehow the sickness remained. The snow, when it fell, made her throat ache and her mouth taste like blood. It seemed as though it snowed for weeks. The ache and the cold settled into her, and one day she woke up and it seemed normal.

She went out of the apartment one day in February, and was surprised to find that the air tasted like spring. She wiped her nose, coughed, lifted her head, and saw a familiar figure in black striding down the sidewalk, the wind making his long coat whip around his ankles.

His skin wasn't quite the color of the snow, she noticed. It was warmer, a faint tinge of petal pink adorning the tip of his nose, his cheeks. "Do you want to come inside?" she asked, thinking of the chill that was already attacking the tips of her fingers. She tucked her hands inside her arms, conscious of the wind seeping through the thin cotton of her T-shirt.

"Please," Pendergast said, and he took off his coat and put it around her shoulders. It was only a few yards back to the warmth of the building, but she tugged the garment tightly around her anyway.

She made him tea out of the last of the bag he'd bought for her so long ago. She'd grown to like the blend, and had saved it for special occasions, when she really needed to drink something that had cost $200--it didn't taste any different from Tazo if she hadn't remembered the price, the gift, the confusing whirl of time when she'd been furious at Bill and chasing down a nearly-immortal serial killer. She could buy another bag. It wouldn't be the same.

The heat from the tea chased away the pink in his cheeks, and soon he was as pale as before; he seemed alien, hunched over slightly on the sofa. "How have you been?" he asked softly.

Nora sighed. "I'm sick," she said, "I don't know what with, and I hate it here. I don't know why Bill liked it so much--I thought I understood it when I took the job at the Museum, but I don't anymore. It's crowded and cold and I barely know anyone and it's so f*cking lonely--" She swallowed a sob. "I'm sorry," she said, and sipped at her tea, barely tasting it. "Things have been like this for a while. How was New Orleans?"

"Not what I'd expected." Pendergast set his tea down and considered her, blue eyes bright and unreadable. "I've never liked New York in the winter, either. The climate doesn't agree with me."

Nora smiled crookedly. "We're a couple of hothouse flowers, huh?" She saw the trace of a smile on Pendergast's lips, obliterated by his rising teacup. He sipped deliberately, clearly turning over something in his mind.

At last, he set the cup down. "You haven't been well," he said, a statement of fact. "A change of environment would be very beneficial."

"Really," Nora said. "What kind of change of environment do you suggest?"

"Somewhere hot," he said. "Dry, but by the ocean--the sea air is very good for those with mysterious ailments. Somewhere you've never been." He sipped at his tea again. "Morocco, in fact, would be ideal."

"Really," Nora said again, smiling a little. "Why Morocco?"

"Because it is beautiful this time of year," Pendergast said, "and because I have two plane tickets to Tangiers. We leave on Monday, if you're willing." He finished his tea and got up, nodded at Nora as if in thanks.

"Wait," Nora said, and put her tea aside. "I know you're not just going to Tangiers for fun. And I know you're not just asking me for my health." She cocked her head. "What am I going to have to do, and how much danger am I going to be in?"

Pendergast sighed and began to pull on his coat. "You're partially correct. There have been several mysterious disappearances in the city, all of American expatriates, and I am really not at liberty to discuss the case further. I doubt you will be required to do anything, and that is where your second assertion is wrong--your physical condition could be cured easily with the daily use of a Neti pot, but that will not alter the underlying condition. You need a change of scenery, and I know this from experience. When my--when I--" He stopped, looking as though he'd swallowed something unexpected. For a moment, his face looked drawn, older than he really was, and then he turned away.

"If several weeks of leisure in a city with a rich cultural heritage and history isn't enough of an enticement," he added, "I'm meeting Viola Maskelene there. She's been working on a dig a few miles outside of the city. She'd very much like to see you." 


End file.
